The Engines in Maine

After a quick overview of the curriculum on Vessel Operations and Technology, our guide gave us the opportunity to talk to the Maine Maritime students about the project they were currently working on.

They were reassembling an engine after disassembling it, which they said was done with 8 hours of work. I took that as an opportunity to sort of show up my friend Bryan and prove that I knew more about engines then him (I'm in Marine Systems Tech, MST). Although it was a childish kind of thing, it gave us the chance to show how much we knew and what we didn't know. The gaps in vessel ops knowledge were filled by MST. That's why we have all six CTEs.

If we got something wrong, the students weren't afraid of correcting us. They really tried their best to not allow us to leave that room with wrong answers and wrong assumptions. After our little competition, the group as a whole started asking about the different parts of an engine.

That eventually turned into questions about the students themselves and their back story. One of the students we talked to, Jessie, said that she was from Philadelphia, so going from a big city to a rural community was a bit of a culture shock. She adjusted quickly however and is now in her 4th year at her college. This experience was great for me, because I got to see a better picture of a real workplace environment. There was a lot of open space, so for the most part, the shop was spotless. They were at least six engines in the shop, and each engine had two students working on it. I hope that after this experience, I can bring what I saw at Maine Maritime over to the MST shop and the boat building temporary cover.

By Eric Soto, Marine Systems Technology Junior